User talk:EuseBot

It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually.Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

This should be doing too many changes, but I'd like to know where we stand. -- User:Docu at 12:33, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

This should result in almost no changes at all, source categories contain mostly other categories. --Eusebius (talk) 12:58, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

It does work with categories, no? Category:Lakes of Dominica would be one that's not in "Lakes of North America". BTW it currently reads "Synchronize en:Category:Lakes by country with Category:Lakes by country.", but as editing is done on commons, wouldn't it be the other way round? -- User:Docu at 13:04, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I've coded that two months ago, but no, I don't think it categorizes categories. I may change that once I'm convinced that it cannot be too harmful. About your last remark, yes, I know, I should modify the template. --Eusebius (talk) 13:10, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Maybe just changing "with" to "and" in the template avoids changing the sequence of the parameters. -- User:Docu at 13:20, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Articles/categories: yes that's it. There's probably a way to improve things, but I'd like to take time to think about it, because automatic categorization is always risky. About the template, I've updated the phrasing (no change in the syntax). --Eusebius (talk) 13:37, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Hello, I would like to inform you that this edit introduced wrong information. In my view, one cannot (automatically, without a human checking) rely on the fact that two articles with the same name on different wikipedias treat the same subject when there are no interwiki links between these articles. Greetings, --UV (talk) 19:10, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your awareness... Yes, there can be some mistakes, sorry about that, and your remark makes sense. However, as long as Commons interwiki links are neither maintained automatically (AFAIK it is not possible or easy) nor as populated as inter-language link, it is hardly possible to rely on them. Do you have a suggestion on what should be done, other than shutting down the bot feature (which is the only way I see to fully take your comment into acount)? --Eusebius (talk) 21:27, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Hello, I am not suggesting to shut down the feature altogether. Maybe it would be possible to add the categories automatically only if there is either a link from en: to commons: or from commons: to en:, and in all other cases have a human check and confirm that en: and commons: treat the same subject before a bot adds the categories? Greetings, --UV (talk) 22:17, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I think the rarity of interwiki links between en:WP and Commons (especially in the not-so-famous Commons cats and galleries where cat sync is useful) would make the feature totally useless. In the examples I've run, the bot actually worked on about 10% of the existing WP articles. With such a restrictions, it would be only 1 or 2%, I'm afraid. That's a lot of computation time for nothing, and we're basically going back to manual edit. That's why I said that fully complying with your request would probably mean shut down this feature (it was not an aggressive comment at all). --Eusebius (talk) 22:27, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I understand. Let us hope that the proportion of errors remains small ;-) --UV (talk) 23:27, 24 July 2009 (UTC)